Social cognitive development and engagement in dance

Developmental science has largely ignored the possible developmental impacts of childhood dance, a common activity for children. We investigated associations between dance education and social cognitive development in mentalizing and emotion perception abilities with a quasi-experimental mixed methods study. After finding dance experience was associated with better perception of others’ emotional states in young adults with extensive childhood dance (n = 101) compared to a control group (n = 105), in a study comparing children aged 7–12 who participated in one year of dance (n = 67) to a treated control group (n = 47) we found a similar pattern. Qualitative themes from dance teacher interviews (n = 17) and parent and child open-ended responses (n = 65) triangulated quantitative findings and illuminated connected pedagogical and phenomenological processes in dance education. Taken together, results suggest dance education may augment emotion perception components of social cognitive development.